Social unrest flares in Venezuela, police destroy informal outdoor market

The Associated Press

Police demolished the Venezuelan capital’s main outdoor clothing market Jan. 1, provoking irate protests from vendors. (See related Herrera prices story on page A1.)

Security forces fired tear gas and plastic bullets to disperse the crowd in Caracas and arrested two people including a man who tried to detonate a homemade bomb. By mid-afternoon, what was once a labyrinth of stalls selling everything from shoes to batteries to blouses had been reduced to rubble.

“The mayor has done a terrible thing,” said Gladys Lopez de Gaviria, a 46-year-old vendor who said she doesn’t know how she’s going to feed her five children. “They say we’re prostitutes and criminals, but I’ve been a hardworking woman all my life.”

By official estimate, about half of Venezuela’s workers are in the so-called informal economy, selling their wares on sidewalks and street corners and in markets like the one destroyed Jan. 1.

Venezuela’s oil-based economy was hit hard in 1998 by falling international petroleum prices, and growing numbers of people have been forced into the informal economy.

“This is about taking back public space,” Caracas police commissioner Hernan Matute told The Associated Press. He said the La Hoyada market was located on some of Caracas’s most expensive land, and that authorities will build a sports and cultural center there.

“These aren’t your typical street sellers,” he added. “They have credit cards, check books and cellular phones. They’re very shrewd.”

David Lema, 23, an Ecuadorian immigrant, gazed at the tractors destroying his clothing stall as his bone-thin toddler slept in his arms. He said the stall provided sustenance for an extended family of 15 people.

There has been talk of relocating La Hoyada’s 2,000 vendors to some other part of the city, but so far only about a quarter of them have been offered alternatives.